Turning It Off And On Again

Apple’s watchOS 2.0 came out on Monday Sept 21, and I was one of the unlucky ones who had a problem. All of the new ‘native’ apps crashed.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, the original Apple Watch didn’t allow apps to really run on the watch. They ran on the phone and you had to use Bluetooth to connect for data. Now, with watchOS 2, the apps can load locally and use wifi on the Watch itself, making them faster. Exciting times for all. As I explained to my wife, all the Apple default native apps worked fine. The 3rd party ones did not. They all crashed.

Also my battery life went to shit. So I did what one logically does. I rebooted my Watch. That didn’t help. So I went to Google and Reddit (yes, Reddit) and I dug around and found what everyone else had done to fix it:

• Unpair and re-pair
• restore from backup of 2.0
• Setup as new
• Let it sit overnight
• Uninstall apps from phone, reboot phone and watch, reinstall apps on phone, reinstall apps on watch
• Reinstall from my 1.0.1 backup

None of that worked for me, so I filed a ticket with Apple support at about 7:15am. They called me back at 7:30 (which was nifty) and we discussed what I’d tried. They walked me through things, I confirmed I’d tried all of that, and detailed what I’d seen happen. Finally the woman apologized, said she didn’t know why it couldn’t work, and asked if I wanted to mail it in to Apple for a replacement.

I didn’t. I was sure this wasn’t a hardware bug. I asked if I could take it to an Apple Store, and she said yes, making me an appointment at the store for the weekend (the earliest time) but I work .5 miles from a store so I planned to head down after lunch to have a go.

I ended up not doing that.

I work in tech. I’m used to troubleshooting. I went over everything I’d done. I checked and double checked that I was sure I did it right. I went back to the Reddit thread and looked to see if anything new had been posted. Sure enough, there was something. A Zen man in the MacRumors forum had an answer:

• Doing a iphone backup with encryption of data on itunes.
• Delete content of iphone.
• Restore from a backup.
• All native apps are working fine!

While I couldn’t say that was a ‘great’ idea, I figured I had nothing left to lose. Since I always keep a spare cable for my phone and my watch in my bag, I connected them both and tried.

And yes. It worked. Immediately I canceled the appointment with the Apple Help Gurus and started a live chat with them to explain how I fixed it. I also contacted the two app companies I’d been chatting with about it and made sure to confirm on Reddit that it worked for me. Because I will never be DenverCoder9.

The debugging process with the Apple Watch is convoluted. I had a similar headache when I couldn’t get the WiFi working properly. I ended up having to disconnect WiFi from my phone and then re-add it for the Watch to pick it up. It’s not really the best experience, and there’s not a lot of ways to debug things.

While I do like the Apple Watch, the black-box technology aspect of the iPhone is increased since it’s, literally, impossible to use the watch without a phone. You have to both attempt to fix things on the watch and the phone, without having a way to determine which is the broken one. And a ‘reinstall’ is not really the friendliest thing. Had I not had a handy laptop, I would have had to do an iCloud restore, which would kill my activity history (something I’d already accidentally wiped out).

The problem comes back to meaningful error messages. All I could say was “The app crashes and kicks me back to the home screen.” Apple faces the same issues we all do with errors. How do we explain things in an informative way that allows people to react to the errors and know what to do next, when there is no way to gauge their skill set? Sadly, Apple’s route is “Take it to a professional.”

We can’t all do that with our products, and more often than not it leads to frustration and things like ‘Bendgate,’ where people just rant and make a product seem worse when it’s really only a very small percentage of those who are impacted.

Is there an answer? No. But it’s just one more thing to consider when we discuss elegant failures.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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